Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)

by D. H. Lawrence

  A pretty bit of sophistry. Because the sunlight covers all the stars, therefore the stars are one, each is a homogeneous bit of light. Behold, how oneness achieves its ridiculous triumph, by self-deception. It is a famous dodge, this of self-deception. The popes couldn’t squash Galileo. But clever mankind has succeeded in smearing out his star-shine, by a trick of the psyche.

  Mankind is an ostrich with its head in the bush of the infinite. This doesn’t prevent the stars all trooping past with a superb smile at the rump of the bird.

  We don’t find fault with the mental consciousness, the daylight consciousness of mankind. Not at all. We only find fault with the One-and-Allness which is attributed to it. It isn’t One-and-All, any more than the sun is one and all. Has it never occurred to us that the sun serves no more than as a great lantern and bonfire to the ambulating intermediary world? Has it never occurred to us that the sun is not superior to our little earth, and to the other little stars, but just instrumental, a bonfire and a lamp and an axle-tree? After all, it is the little spheres which live, and the great sun is instrumental to their living, even as the powerful arc-lamps high over Piccadilly only serve to illuminate the little feet of foot-passengers.

  So there we are. All our Oneness and our infinite, which does but mount up to the sum-total of human mentality or consciousness, is merely instrumental to the small individual consciousness of individual beings. Bigness as a rule means departure from life. Things which are vividly living are never so very big. Vastness is a term which applies to the non-vital universe. The moment we consider the vital universe, vastness and extensiveness cease to be terms of merit, and become terms of demerit. Whatever is vast and extensive in the living world is less quick, less alive than that which creates no impression of superlative size. In the living world, appreciation is intensive, not extensive. A small fowl like a lark or a kestrel is more to us than a flock of rooks or an ostrich or a condor. One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so.

  Hence the little stellar orbs, living as we feel they must be, are more than the great sun they hover round: just as the shadowy human men are more than the great fire round which they squat and move in the dark camp. So, the universe is a great living camp squatted round the sun. We warm ourselves and prepare our food at the fire. But, after all, the fire is only the means to our living. So the sun. It is but the means to the living of the little mid-way spheres, the great fire camped in the middle of the sky, at which they warm themselves and prepare their meat.

  And so with human beings. One is one, and as such, always more than an aggregation. Vitally, intensively, one human being is always more than six collective human beings. Because, in the collectivity, what is gained in bulk or number is lost in intrinsic being. The quick of any collective group is some consciousness they have in common. But the quick of the individual is the integral soul, for ever indescribable and unstateable. That which is in common is never any more than some mere property of the vital, individual soul.

  Away then with the old system of valuation, that many is more than one. In the static material world it is so. But in the living world, the opposite is true. One is more than many. The Japanese know that one flower is lovelier than many flowers. Alone, one flower lives and has its own integral wonder. Massed with other flowers, it has a being-in-common, and this being-in-common is always inferior to the single aloneness of one creature. Being-in-common means the summing-up of one element held in common by many individuals. But this one common element, however many times multiplied, is never more than one mere part in any individual, and therefore much less than any individual. The more common the element, the smaller is its part in the individual, and hence the greater its vital insignificance. So with humanity, or mankind, or the infinite, as compared with one individual.

  All of which is not mere verbal metaphysic, but an attempt to get in human beings a new attitude to life. Instead of finding our highest reality in an ever-extending aggregation with the rest of men, we shall realize at last that the highest reality for every living creature is in its purity of singleness and its perfect solitary integrity, and that everything else should be but a means to this end. All communion, all love, and all communication, which is all consciousness, are but a means to the perfected singleness of the individual being.

  Which doesn’t mean anarchy and disorder. On the contrary, it hieans the most delicately and inscrutably established order, delicate, intricate, complicate as the stars in heaven, when seen in their strange groups and goings. Neither does it mean what is nowadays called individualism. The so-called individualism is no more than a cheap egotism, every self-conscious little ego assuming unbounded rights to display his self-consciousness. We mean none of this. We mean, in the first place, the recognition of the exquisite arresting tnanifoldness of being, multiplicity, plurality, as the stars are plural in their starry singularity. Lump the green flashing Sirius with red Mars, and what will you get? A muddy orb. Aggregate them, and what then? A mere smudgy cloudy nebula. One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so. Enveloped each one in its fathomless abyss of isolation. Magically, vitally alone, flashing with singleness.

  Towards this, then, we are to educate our children and ourselves. Not towards any infinitely extended consciousness. Not towards any vastness or unlimitedness of any sort. Not towards any inordinate range of understanding or consciousness. Not towards any merging in any whole whatsoever. But delicately, through all the processes of communion and communication, love and consciousness, to the perfect singleness of a full and flashing, orb-like maturity.

  And if this is the goal of all our striving and effort, then let us take the first stride by leaving the child alone, in his own soul. Take all due care of him, materially; give him all love and tenderness and wrath which the spontaneous soul emits: but always, always, at the very quick, leave him alone. Leave him alone. He is not you and you are not he. He is never to be merged into you nor you into him. Though you love him and he love you, this is but a communion in unfathomable difference, not an identification into oneness. There is no living oneness for two people: only a deadly oneness, of merged tfuman beings.

  Leave the child alone. Alone! That is the great word and world. Suppose the moon went through the sky, loving all the stars, hugging them to her breast, and crushing them into one beam with her. O vile thought! Like a swollen leper the dead moon would roll out of a void and corpse-like sky. Supposing she even caught the star Sirius as he passes low, and embraced him into oneness with herself, so that he merged amorphous into her. Immediately Orion would fall to pieces in the ruined heavens, the planets would drop from their orbits, a vast cataclysm and a rain of ruin in the cosmos.

  Sirius must move and flash in his own circumambient space, single. Who knows what strange relation and intercommunion he has with Aldebaran, with the Pole Star, even with ourselves? But whatever his intercommunion, he is never raped from his own singleness, he never falls from his own isolate self.

  The same for the child. After the navel-string breaks, he is alone in the aura of his own exquisite and mystic solitariness, and there must be no trespass into this solitariness. He is alone. Leave him alone. Never forget. Never forget to leave him alone, within his own soul’s inviolability.

  Do not be afraid, either, to drive him into his own soul’s inviolable singleness. A child will trespass. It is born nowadays with an irritable craving to trespass into the nature of its mother. Nay, the parent- child relationship in these nervous days resolves itself into one series of trespasses across the confines of the two natures, till there is some unholy arrest.

  Now the seeking centres of the human system are the great sympathetic centres. It is from these, and primarily from the solar plexus, that the individual goes forth seeking communion with another being or creature or thing. At the solar plexus the child yearns avidly for the mother, for contact, for unison, for absorption even. A nervous child yearns and frets ceaselessly for complete identification. It wants to merge, to merge back i
nto the mother, with the ceaseless craving of morbid love.

  What are we to do when a child a few weeks old is so smitten, nervously craving for the mother and for re-identification with her? What on earth are we to do?

  It is quite simple. Break the spell. Set up the activity of the volitional centres. For at the volitional centres a creature keeps itself apart, integral, centred in its own isolation. Living as we have done in one mode only, the mode of love, praising as we have done the single mode of unification and identification through love with the beloved, and with all the rest of the universe, we have used all the strength of the upper, mentally directed will to break the power of these dark, proud, integral volitional centres of the lower body. And we have almost succeeded. So that human life is born now creeping, parasitic in its tendency. The proud volitional centres of the lower body, those which maintain a human being integral and distinct, these have collapsed, so that the whole individual crawls helplessly and parasitically from the sympathetic centres, to establish himself in a permanent life-oneness with another being, usually the mother. And the mother, too, rejoices in this horrible parasitism of her child, she feels exalted, like God, now she is the host of the parasite.

  Break the horrible circle of this lust. Break it. Seize babies away from their mothers, with hard, fierce, terrible hands. Send the volts of fierce anger and severing force violently into the child. Volts of hard, violent anger, that shock the feeble volitional centres into life again. Smack the whimpering child. Smack it sharp and fierce on its small buttocks. With all the ferocity of a living, healthy anger, spank the little tail, till at last the powerful dynamic centres of the spinal system vibrate into life, out of their atrophied torture. It is not too late. Quick, quick, mothers of England, spank your wistful babies. Good God, spank their little bottoms; with sharp, red anger spank them and make men of them. Drive them back. Drive them back from their yearning, loving parasitism; startle them for ever out of their pseudo-angelic wistfulness; cure them with a quick wild yell of all their wonder-child spirituality. Sharp, sharp, before it is too late. Be fierce with the little darling, and put hell’s temper into its soft little soul. Quick, before we are lost.

  Let us get this wide, wistful look out of our children’s eyes — this oh-so-spiritual look, varied by an oh-so-spiteful look. Let us cure them of their inordinate sensitiveness and consciousness. Kick the cat out of the room when the cat is a nuisance, and let the baby see you do it. And if the baby whimpers, kick the baby after the cat. In just mercy, do it. And then maybe you’ll have a slim-muscled, independent cat that can walk with a bit of moon-devilish defiance, instead of the ravel of knitting-silk with a full belly and a sordid meeau which is “Pussy” of our dear domestic hearth. More important than the cat, you’ll get a healthily reacting human infant, animal and fierce and not-to-be-coddled, the first signs of a proud man whose neck won’t droop like a weak lily, nor reach forward for ever like a puppy reaching to suck, and whose knees won’t be aching all his life with a luscious, loose desire to slip into some woman’s lap, dear darling, and feel her caress his brow.

  This instant moment we’ve got to start to put some fire into the backbones of our children. Do you know what the backbone is? It is the long sword of the vivid, proud, dark volition of man, something primal and creative. Not that miserable mental obstinacy which goes in the name of will nowadays. Not a will-to-power or a will-to-goodness or a will-to-love or a will-fo anything else. All these wills to this, that, and the other are only so many obstinate mechanical directions given to some chosen mental idea. You may choose the idea of power, and fix your mechanical little will on that, as the Germans did; or the idea of love, and fix your equally mechanical and still more obstinate little will on that, as we do, privately. And all you’ll get is some neurotic automaton or parasite, materialistic as hell. You must be automatic and materialistic once you substitute an ideal pivot for the spontaneous centres.

  But at the centres of the primal will, situate in the spinal system, the great volitional centres, here a man arises in his own dark pride and singleness, his own sensual magnificence in single being. Here the flashing indomitable man himself takes rise. It is not any tuppenny mechanical instrumental thing, a will-to-this or a will-to- that.

  And these, these great centres of primal proud volition, these, especially in the lower body, are the life-centres that have gone soft and rotten in us. Here we need sharp, fierce reaction: sharp discipline, rigour; fierce, fierce severity. We, who are willing to operate surgically on our physical sick, my God, we must be quick and operate psychically on our psychic sick, or they are done for.

  Whipping, beating, yes, these alone will thunder into the moribund centres and bring them to life. Sharp, stinging whipping, keen, fierce smacks, and all the roused fury of reaction in the child, these alone will restore us to psychic health. Away with all mental punishments and reprobation. You must rouse the powerful physical reaction of anger, dark flushing anger in the child. You must. You must fight him, tooth and nail, if you’re going to keep him healthy and alive. And if you’re going to be able to love him with warm, rich bowels of love, my heaven, how you must fight him, how openly and fiercely and with no nonsense about it.

  Rouse the powerful volitional centres at the base of the spine, and those between the shoulders. Even with stinging rods, rouse them.

  IX

  In the early years a child’s education should be entirely non- mental. Instead of trying to attract an infant’s attention, trying to arouse its notice, to make it perceive, the mother or nurse should mindlessly put it into contact with the physical universe. What is the first business of the baby? To ascertain the physical reality of its own context, even of its own very self. It has to learn to wave its little hands and feet. To a baby it is for a long time a startling thing, to find its own hand waving. It does not know what is moving, nor how it moves. It is quite unconscious of having inaugurated the motion, as a cat is unconscious of what makes the shadow after which it darts, or in what its own elusive tail-tip consists. So a baby marvels over the transit of this strange something which moves again and again across its own little vision. Behold, it is only the small fist. So it watches and watches. What is it doing?

  When a baby absorbedly, almost painfully watches its own vagrant and spasmodic fist, is it trying to form a concept of that fist? Is it trying to formulate a little idea? “That is my fist: it is I who move it- I wave it so, and so!” — Not at all. The concept of I is quite late in forming. Some children do not realize that they are themselves until they are four or five years old. They are something objective to themselves: “Jackie wants it” — ”Baby wants it” — and not “I want it.” In the same way with the hand or the foot. A child for some years has no conception of its own foot as part of itself. It is “the foot.” In most languages it is always “the foot, the hand,” and not “my foot, my hand.” But in English the ego is very insistent. We put it selfconsciously in possession as soon as possible.

  None the less, it is some time before a child is possessed of its own ego. A baby watches its little fist waving through the air, perilously near its nose. What is it doing, thinking about the fist? NO! It is establishing the rapport or connexion between the primary affective centres which controls the fist. From the deep sympathetic plexus leaps out an impulse. The fist waves, wildly, to the peril of the little nose. It waves, does it! It leaps, it moves! And from the fountain of impulse deep in the little breast, it moves. But there is also a quiver of fear because of this spasmodic, convulsive motion. Fear! And the first volitional centre of the upper body struggles awake, between the shoulders. It moves, the arm moves, ah, convulsively, wildly, wildly! Ah, look, beyond control it moves, spurting from the wild source of impulse. Fear and ecstasy! Fear and ecstasy! But the other dawning power obtrudes. Shall it move, the wildly waving little arm? Then look, it shall move smoothly, it shall not flutter abroad. So! And so! Such a swing means such a balance, such an explosion of force means a leap in such and
such a direction.

  The volitional centre in the shoulders establishes itself bit by bit in relation to the sympathetic plexus in the breast, and forms a circuit of spontaneous-voluntary intelligence. The volitional centres are those which put us primarily into line with the earth’s gravity. The wildly waving infant fist does not know how to swing attuned to the earth’s gravity, the omnipresent force of gravity. Life flutters broadcast in the baby’s arm. But at the thoracic ganglion acts a new vital power, which gradually seizes the motor energy that comes explosive from the sympathetic centre, and ranges it in line with all kinetic force, in line with the mysterious, omnipresent centre-pull of the earth’s great gravity. There is a true circuit now between the earth’s centre and the centre of ebullient energy in the child. Everything depends on these true, polarized or orbital circuits. There is no disarray, no haphazard.

  Once the flux of life from the spontaneous centres is put into its true kinetic relation with the earth’s centre, adjusted to the force of gravity; once the gravitation of the baby’s hand is spontaneously accepted and realized in the primary affective centres of the baby’s psyche, then that little hand can take true and voluntary direction. The volitional centre is the pole that relates us, kinetically, to the earth’s centre. The sympathetic plexus is the source whence the movement-impulse leaps out. Connect the two centres into a perfect circuit, and then, the moment the baby’s fist leaps out for the tassel on its cradle, the volitional ganglion swings the leaping fist truly to its goal.

  But this requires practice, for a baby. And in the course of the practice the infant bangs its own nose and swings its arm too far, so that it hurts, and brings a fair amount of trouble upon itself. But in the end, the fluttering, palpitating movement of the first days becomes a true and perfect flight, a gesture, a motion.